Page 120 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

106 CHAPTER 5
studies may not need to know that the plural of calf is calves, and learners who do not play cards should not bother remembering that poker does not have a plural form.
Lexical groupings of noncount nouns can be further simplified by organizing the list by their endings. Plural cannot be used with:
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-work nouns—homework, coursework, work, fieldwork (i.e., all types of work performed by people, but notframeworkand network)
-age nouns—courage, voltage, postage, luggage, baggage, barrage, change (money), garbage (but not garage)
-edge nouns—knowledge, pledge
-ice nouns—advice,juice,practice, malice, including ice
-ware nouns—-freeware, hardware, shareware, software, silverware, flat-
ware, stoneware
-fare nouns—welfare, warfare, fare,
-th nouns—breadth, health, warmth, wealth, strength, truth, youth (but not myth, depth, width, or length; see singular and plural meanings of nouns later)
many -a/ence, -ment, -ness, -(s/t)ure, -(i)ty, -ing nouns, usually called
abstractions in students textbooks. These derived nouns often have different meanings in singular and plural forms (see Nominali- zations and Gerunds).
nouns that have the same form as verbs—air,fish,fog (up), help,ice, iron, mail, play, oil,rain, slang, snow, smoke, traffic, water, weather, work (some nouns are duplicated in these categories based on the what- ever works principle)
nouns that exist only in noun form—art, business, energy, fun, gram- mar, music, oxygen, trouble, virtue, vocabulary, wisdom
Languages and People Rule. If a noun ends with -n or -i (American, Korean, German, Moroccan, Indonesian, Norwegian; Iraqi, Irani, Emirati, Somali), the plural marker is required. No plural can be used with any other types of nouns and adjectives that refer to languages and people. For example,
Arabic [language]—Arab [person] have different adjective-noun forms. On the other hand, Amharic, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Dutch, French, English, Spanish refer to both languages and people and do not take plural markers.
It is important to distinguish between the names of languages and people that function as nouns or adjectives. If the name is followed by another noun, as in Indonesian students/people/professors/culture, plural markers cannot be used with the first noun (see Compound Nouns)because in this case Indonesian/American/Somali has the function of an adjective. However, if a noun follows immediately, the plural form is required (e.g., Indonesians, Americans, Somalis).
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